Sweetfern, Comptonia peregrina, is neither sweet nor a fern, but is one of my favorite plants. It looks like something the dinosaurs would have walked through, and smells like all the warmest, spiciest, most magical aromas of imagination.

Saturday, December 31, 2016

~~~Edited to add:Unlike previous end-of-year pictorials, this time I did not have software available to make a multiple-image collage for each month. I think choosing just one image for each month took nearly as long as building a dozen collages!Each month name is a link to the post containing the image, in case of anyone feels like going back in time for just a little while.Best wishes to everyone for a safe and happy New Year's Eve...hope to see you in 2017. ~~~~~

Saturday, December 17, 2016

The goats are all well-dressed for Winter, but I saw both Betula (above) and LeShodu (below) hold up one hoof for a few moments when I was collecting the empty breakfast buckets. Cold feet, goats? But they were not interested in going back into the barns.

On days like this, buckets contain extra oats, for extra warming power. Speaking of buckets...on each of the goatcams, one of the preset directions points directly down into a big water bucket.

Being able to check the water levels from inside the house is a functional luxury for me. Is the water is clean? Are the de-icers are working? If either answer is "no" it means getting out there immediately, night or day.

And the water level in each bucket tells me how many gallon jugs of water I'll need to set outside the door at chore times. That way I don't have to keep coming back inside, pulling off my boots (cleats and floors don't mix) and going to the sink to fill another jug while leaving clumps of melting snow all over the kitchen.

The above picture was taken by a goatcam at about 1PM yesterday.

The goats choose to spend most of their time outside, so I throw hay down in several locations both in and out of the barns.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

A kitten can scroll a touchscreen with her paw.
Considering that I - a human with fingers - sometimes have trouble with the touchscreen, this really amazed me.

Kittens can also - in a split second, on a daily basis,

and with just one little paw -

find things on your laptop you have never seen before.

They can summon Help for the operating system. Repeatedly.

They can turn on voice activation.

They can open a pop-up window of keyboard shortcuts that I wish I could find again.

They can set up skype.

They can mute the system in a way that requires googling to figure out how to cancel. (So far, they themselves have not googled anything. But to be on the safe side, I only open Amazon when they are both asleep.)

They can add umlauts to the onscreen keyboard.

I still haven't figured out how to undo that.

They can compose and send a tweet:

I just noticed: twitter provided a "translate" button on the kitten-tweet - LOL!

A couple of days ago I opened my laptop and found
a pop-up window on twitter that sternly warned:

You are not permitted to Block yourself.

Well, thank goodness, is all I can say to that. Because I don't know how I could have ever gotten back into my account to Unblock myself.

Of course there's one thing I already knew, but which the kittens have learned:

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The morning sun was just coming up through the trees, so plants close to the ground were still coated with frost. The trees were intercepting the sun rays, and frost on hemlock needles and beech leaves was sparkling and literally disappearing before my eyes. Melted frost dripped from the tips of beech leaves faster than I could focus on an individual droplet.

This particular mullein plant has given me a lot of pleasure this year.

It grew in the Very Raised Bed, so I walked by often and stopped to admire it many, many times.

You may already know that mullein is a biennial plant. The first year there is a rapidly-growing basal rosette of thick, fuzzy "bunny ears."

(That may sound twee or childish, but I defy anyone to see that first rosette of mullein leaves in the Spring and not think of soft furry ears.)
The second year, the plant produces it's impressive stalk and flowers. I find mullein visually interesting at all stages of it's life, and all year round.

Mullein is always a popular plant with pollen-gatherers.

This one had frequent visitors:

I did an ink-and-watercolor drawing based on that same cluster of blossoms. Can you tell I was drawing a stalk that was far over my head?

The big soft leaves and sunny flowers made me smile so many times all through the summer. And come next Spring, I'll hope to find new mullein plants, offspring of this one, sprouting nearby.

Dear readers...

Backlinks to my posts are very welcome, but please: no photograph or text may be reproduced without written permission. All images & content are subject to Copyright and are Sole Property of Cloud Harvest Cashmere. Thank you!